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News Archive: Year Eight

Strict schoolmistress offers art historical discipline

3rd September 2014 The speaker at our September meeting was Kellyanne O'Callaghan, addressing us on the subject of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Kellyanne took a feminist approach, arguing that EFB, like other female Pre-Raphaelites was not taken as seriously as the men, despite being popular and commercially successful at the time. She examined how EFB's approach differed from her male colleagues' when handling the same mythological subjects, depicting female characters as strong and in control rather than passive and helpless. Kellyanne herself is a secondary school teacher and the assembled throng were perhaps startled by the authoritative tone and enforced audience participation, with plenty of exercises and games deployed to drill some learning into our skulls…

Club succumbs to poisonous influence

6th August 2014 On a day hot enough to prompt some of the male Clubmen to remove their tweed jackets, the Club gathered, paper fans fluttering, to hear Mr David De Vynél talk to us about the history of submarines. Sadly they were disappointed, because David decided to talk about the history of poisoning instead. His focus ran from Mary Blandy, whose trial for murdering her father by poison in 1751 caught the public attention because she was well-to-do, through the boom years of the 19th century, when arsenic trioxide was easily available and both deadly and unpleasant. Poison was almost exclusive a woman's weapon, presumably because they not only lacked the physical advantage for violence but also because they would usually be the one preparing food and so would have the opportunity to administer it. More disturbing, with the advent of Friendly Societies and Burial Clubs, effectively a cheap for of life insurance, there developed a nasty practice of producing children, insuring their lives then poisoning them for profit. When an Act banning the insuring of children's lives for more than £3 was passed, child mortality dropped off dramatically. Many thanks to David for this talk.

Ancient curse makes for jolly evening

26th July 2014 Once again a mob of Sheridanites descended o n the capital for our annual summer party. This time our theme was all things Egyptian and in particular the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and the Egypt-mania it inspired in popular culture.
The venue was once again the Adam Street Club (whose underground vaults have so far doubled as a Mexican cantina, a WWI trench and now an ancient Egyptian tomb). Sadly the club has been bought by developers and was to close two weeks later—in fact it was looking a bit empty already as some of the furniture had gone…

As usual we had our Snuff Bar and the Grand Raffle, with fine haul of themed nonsense as prizes. Live music came from three members of the Top Shelf Band, for whom wearing the fez is second nature. Our games this time included Shoot the Nose Off the Sphinx (no one managed a direct hit—it may be time to invest in some less knackered darts for the dart gun, as seen above); Unwrap the Mummy (Pass the Parcel by any other name, with the person who removes the last bandage finding a chocolate sarcophagus at the centre)—no pictures unfortunately as I was operating the music in this game—and our Tomb Raider game, in which players lower their faithful servant Abdul (looking a lot like Action Man in a fez) on a rope into the tomb where they have 60 seconds to scoop up as much treasure as they can, using a wire hook on Abdul’s hand—harder than it looks.
Many thanks to all who came along and made such an effort with the costumes!

The prizes for the Grand Raffle. The black boxes were Cursed Prizes (one held a lollipop with a scorpion in in, one held some "Camel Balls" bubble gum, one held a roll of bandages and a bottle of embalming fluid—actually gin—and one was just a box of sand). The canopic jar was handmade and donated by Lorna Mower-Johnson and mercifully contained sweets rather than viscera

Club holds its own in bloodiest Chap Olympics yet

12th July 2014 The Chap Magazine organised the tenth Chap Olympiad, its annual celebration of a sporting contest for people who don't really like sport and don't want to damage their trouser creases by exerting themselves too much. The line-up of games changes every year: nowadays they are actually quite vigorous, involving charging at each other or whacking people with umbrellas, whereas in the past we had such games as the Martini Relay (relay teams make a Martini cocktail in stages, with the winner chosen on the quality of the finished drink), the Ten Yard Saunter (where the winner is the last person to cross the finish line) or Shouting at Foreigners (where contestants must somehow get a foreigner to do a specified task). We had perfect weather this time, sunny but not too hot and only the briefest of rain showers and much ingenuity had been applied to the traditional smuggling of alcohol into the event, including hollowed out fruit, loaves of bread and even a book—Mikhail managed to conceal an entire bottle of Bombay Sapphire inside a melon. (The event is largely organised by Bourne and Hollingsworth who are keen to sell punters drinks, but many of the old guard remember when the Chap Olympics was just a group of people coming together with picnics in a park, and somewhat resent the co-opting of it into a ticketed event.) The New Sheridan Club had its traditional gazebo up, functioning as a rallying point as well as a shelter from the rain and sun. NSC Members made a good showing in the events—our Chairman Torquil Arbuthnot was even briefly knocked out during the Briefcase Phalanx game and had to be taken to hospital—but for the first time in many years we didn't take any of the main prizes. However, Mikhail Korausch was awarded the prize for Best Moustache and Katie Holt won Best Dressed, so honour was maintained. Half-time entertainment this came in the inspired form of Sir Leopold Alexander, Victorian Strongman, and music was provided by NSC clubman and DJ Vince Moses. Afterwards there was a general move to the Jack Horner pub where we baffled the non-Chaps, who were very much in the minority. Huzzah.

Tug of Hair, which is basically Tug of War using an extension of Atters' moustache

There seemed to be an awful lot of mass bundles on stage this time. Here Zack gets involved in his
own particular way

Bodyline bowling comes under Club's scrutiny

2nd July2014Our guest speaker on this sunny day was the Earl of Essex (probably the most prolific speaker we have), this time talking about D.R. Jardine the man who captained the English cricket team during the infamous "Bodyline" Ashes series. Essex gave us Jardine's background as a schoolboy cricketer at Winchester, where toughness and self-belief were taught, and outlined just how devastating Australia's batsman Don Bradman was known to be. Bodyline was developed as a way of neutralising Bradman, bowling fast and short so that the ball bounced up at the batsman's body or face, forcing him to knock it aside defensively into the hands of fielders standing in a crowd around him. The Australians were outraged and even telegraphed the MCC declaring the strategy to be unsportsmanlike—a word that incensed the MCC in turn. Jardine's behaviour (which some of his own team condemned) still divides opinion, but in time Bodyline bowling was effectively banned. Many thanks to Essex. We were also lucky enough to be treated to a rare visit from New Zealand Members Dirk Hensius, who brought with him a splendid all-wood churchwarden pipe. A fine evening all round.

Victorian eccentric who brought us the cuppa

4th June 2014 The speaker at our June meeting was Eugenie Rhodes, whose subject was the Victorian botanist-adventurer Robert Fortune. She had originally been planning to cover Reginald Farrer as well, another eccentric plant-hunter, but she found Fortune quite fascinating enough to fill a whole talk. Fortune is best remembered as the man to whom you owe your cuppa—before him, tea had to be traded from the Chinese, who guarded its secrets closely. Fortune risked his life (at a time when venturing more than a day's journey from the treaty ports meant a death sentence for foreigners) going under cover, disguised as a mandarin, to collect specimens of tea plants in China and bribed local experts to advise the British on setting up their own tea plantations in India—with the result that the price of tea plummeted in Blighty, bringing it within reach of the common man. Fortune himself, pretty much a self-made man, managed to live up to his name and make himself rich by selling the other exotic specimens he collected on his travels. Many thanks to Eugenie for her talk.

Who says thin men aren't jolly?

11th May 2014 Our Film Night for May was The Thin Man (1934), presented, ahead of the remake that will apparently star Johnny Depp, by Mai Møller. Based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, the story concerns Nick and Nora Charles (played by William Powell and Myrna Loy), he an ex-private detective and she a wealthy heiress. The plot is kicked off when a friend, Clyde Wynant, disappears after a murder. Wynant is the “thin man” of the title, but audiences apparently assumed that the epithet referred to the film’s hero, Nick, and all five of the sequels ran with this concept: After the ThinMan (1936), Another Thin Man (1939), Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) and Song of the Thin Man (1947). The film was not a major investment, shot in just 14 days, but it was one of the ten highest earners of the year, endearing itself to audiences mainly because of the wise-cracking dialogue between husband and wife, who exhibit a flirtatious chemistry throughout (yes, even though they are married). Critic Roger Ebert, who places it on his personal list of Great Movies, particularly praises Powell, whom he believes “is to dialogue what Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying”. Whatever the reason, the film’s innovative blend of mystery, romance and comedy created a template that remained popular with studios for many years. In addition to the film sequels there was a spin-off radio series in the 1930s, a TV series in the 1950s, a TV movie in 1977 and a Broadway musical in 1991. NSC Members might also appreciate the sheer amount of time that Mr and Mrs Charles seem to spend in bars, cocktail in hand. (In fact on the film’s release one Southern distributor complained to the studio about the excessive amount of drinking that goes on.) And if that isn’t enough, Nick and Nora have a dog, a wire-haired terrier called Asta, who appears in all six films.

Club awed by Hitler's personal pscyhic

7th May 2014 The speaker at our May meeting was Birgit Gebhardt, whose subject was Erik Jan Hanussen. The child of two failed Austrian cabaret artists (and born Hermann Steinschneider) he went on to become an immensely successful stage clairvoyant, mentalist and hypnotist, earning a fortune, which he spend on a yacht and mansion, and surrounding himself with beautiful young women. But his life was full of ups and downs—he also gave personal seances and fortune tellings, and under German law, although the stage shows could be classified as entertainment, the private services were different, repeatedly leading to his being charged with fraud. He also became very pally with the Nazis, frequently lending money to high-ranking officers and giving Hitler lessons in oratory, crowd control and the use of psychology and dramatic effect when staging meetings. But Hanussen's whole identity was a lie: not only was he not the Danish aristocrat he claimed to be, but he was also Jewish. His world tours may have served to get him out of trouble, but their success was often hampered by his inability to speak anything other than German and Yiddish. He was a tyrannical taskmaster, leaving a trail of disgruntled assistants ripe for spilling the beans on him. It's not really clear what led to Hanussen's sudden and squalid demise—kidnapped by SA men, shot and buried in a field. It may have been the discovery of his Jewishness, but it was more likely that he had become too much competition for Hitler's attention in the eyes of Goebbels and Goering, or that his famous prediction of the Reichstag fire may have been the unwise public use of insider information. (The Nazis blamed the Communists, as an excuse for Hitler to seize greater power, but in fact the Nazis had done it themselves; so Hanussen's trick put them in jeopardy.) Thanks to Birgit for a fascinating talk.

Club studies alien cultures

5th May 2014 NSC Member Incy Wincy Spider organised a grand day out, the second annual Order of the Fez, incorporating a fun treasure hunt around the British Museum. The hunt took us all around the various collections as we sought the individual items on display that would allow us to answer a series of riddles (who said Chappism wasn't educational?). More than 20 intrepid types, drawn mostly from the ranks of the New Sheridan Club and the Eccentric Club, convened on the steps of the BM, then made a beeline for a suitable backdrop for a group photo. The biggest hoot was the reactions of the general public: as I arranged the group photo, within 30 seconds a semicicle of camera-toting onlookers formers around us. This attention continued as we scattered to pursue our quest. Well, all apart from Minna, Dave Hollander and Anton Krause, who were found to have high-tailed it pretty sharpish to the nearest boozer… At the end of the day Incy awarded a prize for the most correct answers and a prize for the best dressed participant (which went to Darcy Sullivan). Many thanks to Incy for his organisational zeal and finesse.

Bow ties, it seems, are cool

2nd April 2014 The speaker at our April Club Night was Mr Mikhail Korausch. A Frenchman by birth, Mikhail first joined the Club a couple of years ago, seemingly with a primary interest in photography, though with a day job in banking. However, after his return to France it seems he has worked as a teacher and travelled the world, before reinventing himself as a maker and seller of bow ties. He was inspired to get into this game by his frustration at being unable to find bow ties of satisfactory generosity and plumpness. (He passed round examples of inferior ties, flimsy in weight and seemingly glued together.) He sourced silks from Italian mills and taught himself to cut and sew the kind of tie he wanted, generously proportioned, with a proper lining and not over-pressed. His ties come in various sizes and different shapes—the classic butterfly shape, the straight batwing, with diamond-shaped tips and a more informal shape with rounded ends for relaxing at home, gardening or working on the car. Everything is done by Mikhail himself, including the photography on his website and he has even sourced bespoke boxes made from a sort of flexible plywood. You can see Mikhail's range at www.labowtique.com. In the top picture he is wearing a large butterfly (top) and a smaller diamond. We were also treated to a bowtie striptease from inveterate bowtie-earer Curé Michael Silver (see picture right)…

Club considers the dead

23rd March 2014 Our March film night finally saw what was originally intended to be the second part of our February Valentine’s-themed double bill. The film was The Dead (1987), proposed by Chuckles Younghusband, and it couldn’t have contrasted more with the Harold Lloyd comedy we showed the previous month. An adaptation of a James Joyce short story, the longest in the collection The Dubliners, the film follows an Epiphany party thrown in 1904 by two elderly sisters, and focuses on their nephew, the quiet academic Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta. Much of it is gently comic, observing the hostesses’ concerns over the running of the party, carriage drivers who don’t know their way around Dublin, the behaviour of Freddie, browbeaten by his mother and turned to drink, and Gabriel’s nerves over the speech he must make at the end of dinner.

As Chuckles himself observed, not much really happens. Apart from a few scenes in carriages at the beginning and the end, the whole film takes place inside the sisters’ house, giving it a warmly enclosed feeling, rather than anything claustrophobic. But towards the end a folk song is sung, and this triggers a memory in Gretta: a long-forgotten beau used to sing it to her, a young man who loved her so much he allowed himself to die for her. As she tells this story to Gabriel he reflects what a small and unexciting role he has played in her life, and considers his elderly aunt’s all-too-imminent passing. “Better to pass boldly into the other world in the full glory of our passion than to fade and wither dismally with age. I’ve never felt that way about any woman.” All over Ireland snow is falling on the living and the dead, faintly, “like the descent of their last end”. It is worth noting that the director John Huston, better known for masculine action films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), was himself dying as he made it. Thanks to Chuckles for suggesting the film.

Motorcycle madness seizes Club

5th March2014Our March meeting featured a lecture by Mr Stephen Myhill entitled Thrilling the Million: The Lure of the Speedway. "No brakes, no gears, no fear," Mr Myhill explained by way of introduction. "I will entertain with stories of the early days of the dirt track. Motorcycle speedway racing in the UK is nearing its 90th birthday. In the boom years either side of the war, speedway riders were among the highest-earning sports stars. So drop your clutch, twist your throttle and go elbow-to-elbow with the kings of the cinders." My Myhill was true to his word, and we learned all about the birth of the sport (in Australia, where a promoter desperate to get the punters in to his athletics events, decided to include some motorcycle racing) and the specifics of the bikes—engines that run on methanol at absurdly high revs with only really two speeds (on and off) and prone to exploding. We heard about the high-earning stars with unlikely names (Split Waterman, Sprouts Elder, Acorn Dobson, etc), and the chap who arrived at the track fresh from Savile Row in a new bespoke threads but couldn't resist showing off on a bike—with his suit jacket billowing over his head he inevitably crashed, ruining the entire outfit. Many thanks to Mr Myhill for his oration.

Double bill of love proves too much

23rd February 2014 In recognition of St Valentine's Day earlier in the month, our February Film Night was scheduled as a double bill of films about love, the (perhaps odd) pairing of Harold Lloyd's silent comedy Girl Shy (1924) with John Huston's sepulchral last film The Dead (1987). However, come 9.30 when we were about to show the second film, it transpired that a number of people who were keen to see it would not actually be able to stay till the end—so we decided to postpone it till the following month.

Harold Lloyd made over 200 movies and is most remembered for his hair-raising stunts. In fact in an accident with an exploding prop he lost a finger and thumb on his right hand, which he would subsequently disguise with a special glove (and watching Girl Shy I did notice how it is always his left hand that is to the fore). His later films were more character-based—usually a character called Harold in his trademark round spectacles (which were just plain glass), a hapless but determined Everyman. In Girl Shy he plays a small-town naif who is terrified of women and stammers uncontrollably when under stress, yet who (rather inexplicably) writes a treatise on The Secret of Making Love, in which he documents his fictitious conquests. In fantasy sequences we see two of these, telling glimpses into the obsessions of the time—the Vampire (the man-eating Theda Bara type, a term later shortened to “vamp”), against whom the correct technique is indifference; and the Flapper, shown as dizzy and silly, drinking and smoking ostentatiously but also strangely girly, playing with dolls, etc. (Interestingly, we tend to picture a flapper with a Louise Brooks bob, but here she still has the Mary Pickford curls.) The way to win her, by the way, is to unleash your inner caveman (see picture above).
On the way to the city to find a publisher Harold meets a girl and they are smitten with one another. But when the publisher laughs him out of the office her realises he could never support her so he pretends that he was never interested, that she was just another conquest. However, the publisher then realises he could make a fortune selling Harold’s book as a joke (The Diary of a Boob) and offers him a hefty advance. Now Harold must race across town by a series of unlikely vehicles (cue all the hair-raising stunts we expect) to stop the girl marrying a rotter. We tend to think of silent comedies as broad slapstick with exaggerated expressions and gestures, but I was struck by the naturalism of the performances. Although it is silent you can often see what the actors are saying—and it is ironic that key plot points revolve around the fact that under stress Harold’s stammer prevents him from speaking! Thanks to David Pile for suggesting the film.

Plucky few make their own entertainment

5th February 2014 Members found themselves relying on their wits and inner resources at our February meeting, as strikes in London dealt a body blow to the public transport system, meaning that our scheduled speaker, David de Vynél, was unable to make it. Those Members who did struggle in were treated to a quiz by Artemis Scarheart, reprising some questions from a full scale NSC pub quiz he organised some years ago, and also a game proposed by Craig Young, something apparently devised by C.S. Lewis, wherein players take it in turn to read poetry by Amanda McKittrick Ros without laughing—Amanda is widely considered one of the worst writers in the English language. To give you an example, here are some lines from "Visiting Westminster Abbey":

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with ‘blue’
Undergoes the same as you.
Famous some were—yet they died;
Poets—Statesmen—Rogues beside,
Kings—Queens, all of them do rot,
What about them? Now—they’re not!

Unwelcome guest makes for a welcome screening

12th January 2014 For our first Film Night of the new year, Isabel Spooner-Harvey, currently exiled to the former colonies, suggested the comic caper The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), concerning an acerbic radio personality, Sheridan Whiteside, who, while on a cross-country lecture tour, slips on the icy steps of Ohio couple Ernest and Daisy Stanley. He invites himself to recuperate in their home—which he promptly takes over and dominates from his wheelchair. The film was originally a stage play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who wrote it as a vehicle for their friend Alexander Woollcott—on whom the character of Whiteside is closely based—inspired by a true story. Apparently one day Woollcott showed up, unannounced, at Hart’s Bucks County estate, and proceeded to take over the house. He slept in the master bedroom, terrorised Hart’s staff, and generally acted like Sheridan Whiteside. On his way out he wrote in Hart’s guest book, “This is to certify that I had one of the most unpleasant times I ever spent.” Hart related the story to Kaufman and, as they were laughing about it, Hart remarked that he was lucky that Woollcott had not broken his leg and become stuck there. Kaufman looked at Hart and the idea was born.

In the end Woollcott was too busy to play the role himself in the Broadway run. For the film version Bette Davis wanted to play Maggie Cutler against John Barrymore as Whiteside. But Barrymore was allegedly too drunk to handle the rapid-fire dialogue. Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Robert Benchley and Cary Grant were all considered, but eventually the part went to Monty Woolley, who had played it on Broadway. He was unknown to screen audiences, but Time gushed that, “Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside with such vast authority and competence that it is difficult to imagine anyone else attempting it.” Critical approval was universal, with the New York Times summing it up as “unquestionably the most vicious but hilarious cat-clawing exhibition ever put on the screen, a deliciously wicked character portrait and a helter-skelter satire”.

Sadly Isabel couldn't be there to introduce the film, but it played to a full house and went down well (despite an early hiccup where the film kept playing with dubbing in Spanish—the only Region 2 DVDs available are from Spain!).

Club subjected to exercise regimen

2nd January 2014 As the first Wednesday in the month was actually New Year's Day, we though it shrewd to push the meeting back a day (pushing it back a week was not an option as there is a regular booking by someone else), which inevitably confused a number of people. However, we had a reasonable turnout for Gillian Greenwood's unusual talk on sorting out aching backs and necks, using the principles of pilates, developed in the 1940s. Many of us are deskbound these days and poor posture can lead to all kinds of chronic problems. Once the awkward business of finding our pelvic floor muscles was out of the way, Gillian gave use some simple exercises to do. I must admit I had expected a level of scepticism and was surprised by how interested the audience was and how willing to engage in the exercises Gillian gave us to try out. Many thanks to Gillian for the talk and the years of pain-free slouching, sloping and mooching we have ahead of us.

Traditional ceremony to check Menders is not dead

20th December 2013 It has long become a tradition that the New Sheridan Club gathers at the Dover Castle public house, in Weymouth Mews, on the last Friday before Christmas, as a final bout of mutual shoulder-clapping before we all go our separate ways for Crimbo. As much as anything it is traditionally the one point in the year when we see Lord Mendrick (above), who spends the rest of the time teaching the children of the rich in Araby or the Orient. This year was no exception and was, as you can see, enlivened by some curious treats that Suzanne Coles brought back with her from Germany, including garish Teutonic meat products and various things dipped in chocolate, such as fresh chillis and a banana. (As you can see on the right, Matthew Howard lost no time in menacing everyone with his sausage; Mrs Palmer-Lewis is holding a chocolate-coated banana on a stick.) The wood-panelled back room that we think of as ours had actually been reserved by another party, but for some reason they spent all their time in the main bar and we quietly annexed the back room. Huzzah. Happy Christmas to one and all, and I'll see you in Hell. Sorry, in the New Year.

Festive gathering celebrates German celluloid classic

15th December 2013 Our December Film Night was an ambitious attempt to show a subtitled version of Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944). This German film, the second of three adaptations of a 1933 novel by Heinrich Spoerl, occupies a special place in the hearts of all Germans, it seems. One online commentator explains, “To Germans this film is like It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca and Citizen Kane all rolled into one. Lines from it are like proverbs.” Birgit Gebhardt tells me that screenings are like Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings here, complete with props and rote voicing of lines. Sure enough I caught Manfred Kronen singing along to the song of the hiking schoolchildren in one scene. No official version with English subtitles exist but Manfred found a subtitle file and we managed to sync it with the video.

Set in the 1930s, the plot concerns a successful young writer who joins some friends around a Feuerzangenbowle, a communal yuletide punch, essentially mulled wine, over which a sugar loaf soaked in high proof rum is placed on a rack and ignited: as the sugar melts and caramelises it drips into the vat of beverage. (For the occasion Hal made up a batch and Manfred was able to source the sugar loaf: see picture right.) The men reminisce about the pranks they got up to in their schooldays, and our hero Pfeiffer reveals that he was home-tutored and experienced none of this. He begins to feel he missed out on something, so he hatches a plan to go to a small town high school where no one will recognise him and disguise himself as a new pupil. (The actor, Heinz Rühmann, had played the same role in another film version ten years earlier, so he was really a bit old for the part this time round.) All goes to plan and he leads his teachers a merry dance with japes and pranks aplenty.

But his urbane girlfriend catches on and comes to persuade him to stop messing about: he is on the brink of heading back to Berlin but, as he passes the school, realises he would rather stay in that homely town with those homely people. In the meantime he has taken a shine to the headmaster’s wholesome blonde daughter. The story ends with his revealing his true identity, having secured the heart of Eva. Oddly, at the very end in voiceover Pfeiffer reveals that the whole story was made up: “Everything but the very beginning. The only true things are the memories we carry with us, the dreams we spin and the desires which drive us. These are the things that should keep us content.” So the message is that you can’t change your past, but should focus on changing the future? Interesting sentiments for a film produced in 1944 which would have had to get past the Nazi board of film censors.

The film also considers the different teaching styles and attitudes of the teachers, which the cool, efficient, authoritarian Brett (a character not in the book) coming across as effortlessly commanding respect. A sop to the film board? But one of the boys, dramatically depicted as keen to “denounce” our hero, is despised by pupils and teachers alike, so it is hard to say exactly where the film’s attitude to authority lies.

Thanks to Manfred and Birgit for their help.

Tommy and Fritz call a truce for Xmas party

14th December 2013 As a nod to the impending First World War anniversary next year, we themed our party around the famous truce in No Man's Land on Christmas Day in 1914. Thanks to sponsorship from The King's Ginger, we offered a gingery Christmas Punch, and one lucky raffle winner took home their own bottle of the Ginger Nectar. Our traditional shooting game this time had a remote-controlled zeppelin as the target, while our other game reproduced the famous No Man's Land soccer matched using a lovingly modified table football table. Musical entertainment came from Patrician Hammond and her band playing pop tunes from the WWI era, which proved enormously popular. God Save the King! (More pictures here.)

Club soothed by music of the Orient

4th December 2013 Instead of a lecture, this time Member Charles Tsua treated us to a recital of tunes on the guqin, or "ancient zither". Made from a single piece of wood, shaped and hollowed out at the back to create a sound box, the zither was originally strung with strings of silk, although metal and nylon are more common these days. Originally there were five strings, representing the five Chinese elements (wood, metal, earth, water and fire), but I gather that various princes added a couple more for good measure. Charles filled us in on history the guqin, telling us how it became usurped by the intelligentsia, who swathed it in symbolism and philosophy and declared that poor people shouldn't be allowed to play it; certainly by modern standards it is a very quiet instrument and better suited to being heard in a small, private room rather than a bawdy alehouse. There is written music for it, some quite ancient, but the instructions tend not to details things like rhythm, which leaves modern players plenty of leeway for their own interpretations. Many thanks to Charles for his performance.

Expeditition to map the public houses of the City of London

20th November 2013 Every year NSC Member Mr Ian White, a stalwart of the Campaigns for Real Ale and Real Cider, organises a pub crawl for us in some district of London, showcasing fine ales and fine pub archi-tecture. This time it was in the City. Because many of these pubs are typically closed at weekends, we moved the crawl from its usual Saturday night slot to a Wednesday evening. And a most agreeable night it was, as these photos attest. Many thanks to Mr White for organising it once again.

Club hears tales of a benign dictator

6th November 2013 Our speaker this time was Mr Mark Gidman, whose subject was 'Marshall Tito and Yugoslavia: The Communist Bourgeoisie Republic?'. Mr Gidman examined Tito's origins and early inclinations towards Socialism, but mostly focused on the ways in which he differed from other Communist leaders—in fact he split dramatically from Stalin, to such an extent that it seems lucky to have avoided invasion. But was it luck? Tito was skilled at sculpting his public comments and responses, and his soft approach to Communism made him popular with the West. (Indeed he loved visiting other heads of state.) He seems to have realised early on that a purely state-run economy was doomed, and instituted worker-run businesses that were allowed to make and share a profit. When other Communist states had closed borders, her allowed Yugoslavians to leave freely—with the effect that they went abroad to work and sent the money home to Yugoslavia, boosting the economy. Mr Gidman was at pains to point out that, while Tito did have a secret police, there were not the show trials found in other regimes; overall he can be seen as a fairly benign dictator. He was lover of fine living and fine tailoring, and although he owned little he was always delighted to accept lavish gifts. When he died his was the largest state funeral in history.

Club delivers double-whammy of celluloid terror

21st October 2013 For our October film night we went with a Halloween theme and offered a double bill, starting with the original 1922 horror classic Nosferatu, based closely on Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by F.W. Murnau, starring the extraordinary goblin-like Max Schreck as the vampire, and full of breath-taking lighting effects and Expressionist camera angles. Then after a short break we showed the much more recent humorous horror romp Shadow of the Vampire (2002), which tells an imagined version of the making of Nosferatu, starring John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Schreck, in which members of the crew start to vanish mysteriously during production. Ed Marlowe kindly presented, introducing the films and explaining just how much of an impact Nosferatu has had on cinema in general, and the horror genre in particular. (For example, in Stoker's original the vampire can tolerate to walk around during the day, while the horror convention that a vampire is actually destroyed by the sun's rays was invented by the Nosferatu film.) He also insists that the dance in Michael Jackson's Thriller video is based on Schreck's claws-up sideways movement…

Very little is known about Max Schreck as a man, other than that he was a bit of a loner. Shadow of the Vampire takes this as a starting point to suggest that he really was a vampire, discovered by Murnau while he was scouting locations. Short of funds and desperate for a hit, Murnau enters into a grisly pact for the vampire to play an actor playing a vampire—in return, the vampire gets access to the prima donna of a leading lady… Although I had seen both films before, there is no doubt that itwas very valuable seeing them together, especially as Shadow of the Vampire makes playful references to actual shots from the original (in some cases splicing original footage together with reshot versions using Dafoe), and we can see how much Eddie Izzard does resemble the actor he is playing, Gustav von Wangenheim.

Thanks to some vigorous marketing by the Teahouse Theatre, we had a goodly turn-out. However, owing to a bit of a cock-up with an online listing we were obliged to delay the start till 8pm to make sure everyone had arrived, but even so there was a hardcore who stayed until the second film finished at 11.30—and gave it a round of applause. Many thanks to Ed and to all who came.

Manfred leaps into breach and breech

2nd October 2013 Sadly our scheduled speaker at the October Club Night had to pull out at the last minute. Fortunately, however, Manfred Kronen volunteered at short notice to tell us all about how to drill a rifle barrel (he works as a gun designer). He brought in various lumps of metal to pass around, to illustrate the various stages of drilling a whole through a metal bar, polishing the drilled surface, cutting the spiral "rifling" grooves inside (which cause the projectile to spin as it leaves the barrel, stablising its trajectory), then honing away the outside to get the finished barrel down to the desired weight. One gets the impression that the barrel is the heart of the weapon, but we learned that it is at the point that the chamber is attached to the barrel that it becomes a licensable firearm. We also learned that, contrary to what you might hear on CSI, a bullet cannot necessarily be traced back to the gun from which it was fired, because by the time another hundred rounds have been put through the barrel its profile will have changed anyway. (A handy tip if you're planning some murder.) Many thanks to Manfred.